X & Y = Zzzzzzzz

Those Coldplay boys will look anywhere for inspiration, including the back end of the dictionary. Their new album is catchily called X&Y: X for excruciating, Y for why bother.

This anxiously-awaited effort from Britain's biggest band has been a long time coming. Wreathed in mystery, the opus took on a slow, beguiling life of its own. First it was ready. Then it wasn't. Months went by while the Coldies argued about whose hits they could most usefully rip off, and by the time they decided to rip off their own, their lead singer, Chris Martin, a 28-year-old, stubbly-chopped West Country accountant's son, had discovered not only marriage and fatherhood, but that rock stardom is a subsidiary activity of saving the world.

So off Chris went in his little "Fair Trade" T-shirt with his dog-eared repertoire of anti-Bush-anti-war jibes, and started saying such things as: "Would it really be possible to start Nazi Germany if you had just been listening to Bob Marley's Exodus back-to-back for three straight weeks and getting stoned?" An interesting question. One made even more so by the certainty that the Weimar Republic was awash from end to end with vastly better music than anything Coldplay, or, for that matter, Bob Marley could manage.

Still, we should be grateful to Chris for the image of the Führer with a stack of reggae records and a big spliff. When Chris wasn't busy analysing the roots of tyranny, he tinkered lovingly with his album. The record company fretted over the effect of the delay on its profits, and the fans gave up wondering what to expect. Now it's here. It's huge. And it's terrible.

As a measure of the menace that Coldplay represents to the listening public consider a poignant letter published in The Daily Telegraph last week: "They ruined what my wife and I had hoped would be a convivial evening at a riverside pub," fumed Graham Vine, of Close Borden, Hampshire. "On arriving we wondered why so many customers were sitting outside on such a chilly, breezy evening. It didn't take long to find out why. Whoever had charge of the pub's sound system inflicted upon us one dismal dirge after another from the Coldplay album, one of the most depressing I have heard."

You could argue, in fairness, that Coldplay's embrace of "glum rock" as a soundtrack to the age has clear attractions. For the young and angst-ridden trying to make sense of an unstable world, the band's sullen melodies and leaden lyrics can sound distinctly homely: "Lights go out and I can't be saved/ Tides that I tried to swim against/ Have brought me down upon my knees," Martin wails in the band's megahit Clocks.

But Clocks was released three years ago, and Coldplay are still remaking it. As the influential New York Times critic Jon Pareles argued last week, in an article denouncing Coldplay as "the most insufferable band of the decade", they have moved on only to the extent of staying the same.

In the beginning Chris Martin was an ambitious, skinny, serious-minded proto-rock star with pale blue eyes, who didn't seem to smile much. Then, 18 months ago, in Santa Barbara, California, he married Gwyneth Paltrow, the Oscar-winning Hollywood actress, and seemed to give up smiling altogether. Maybe it was something she put in the macrobiotic packed lunches with which she sent him off to the recording studio. Or maybe, when he took up the cause of saving Africa, he didn't want Bono to think he was taking the mickey.

As if Chris would. His commitment to changing the world is entirely sincere, and Bono is his hero. "Anyone who criticises me for talking about fair trade is a few pebbles short of a beach," he says. "Because everyone should care about it, just like everyone should care about the environment, because we all live here." Quite.

He and Gwyneth, and their one-year-old daughter, Apple, live in suitable rock splendour in a £3.2 million north London townhouse, under a permanent paparazzi stake-out. Irked by their inconsiderate failure to pose and provide quotes on request, the popular press has christened them "The Glums", and sought to portray Gwyneth as the new Yoko. All of which may explain why Chris isn't smiling. But it doesn't explain why his band is so popular. The answer is, partly, because there's a vacancy.

British rock hasn't found a new angle in years. Thriving at one end of the business are the dinosaur -rockers of the 1960s and '70s, while flourishing at the other are the made-for-television, boy-and-girl groups. Coldplay have quietly bagged the middle ground. They may be unoriginal, but at least they are an unoriginal version of Radiohead. Imagine, or, rather try not to, the unoriginal version of Busted.

Yet there's a further reason why, deep down, we'd love to love them. In a rock world infested by the unsavoury likes of the Gallagher brothers and smacked-out losers such as Pete Doherty, Coldplay are the kind of band you wouldn't mind your own sons joining. These are wholesome young men from respectable families, privately schooled and university educated. They live, for the most part, quiet, sober lives, read books and appreciate their good fortune. If only they could leave it at that.

Chris was born in Devon, the son of Anthony Martin, a well-to-do chartered accountant and his music teacher wife, Alison. He attended Sherborne school where he ran the Sting fan club, feared he might be gay, and, in the hope of building his self-confidence, started a blues band called The Rockin' Honkies whose debut performance was met with an angry chorus of boos. "I was 15," he recalls, "wearing a long black coat. My voice hadn't broken and my lyrics were appalling."

Aged 18, he landed a place at University College London, where he met Will Champion, now Coldplay's drummer, keyboard player Guy Berryman and guitarist Jonny Buckland. Although Martin runs the group, writes its songs and is overwhelmingly its public face, all revenues - after a 10 per cent deduction for charity - are shared equally between the four. In a rare divergence from democratic principle, the band maintains "quiet" and "noisy" tour buses. Chris has the quiet one. The other three have the noisy.

They stole the name Coldplay from another student band, and began playing in pubs in the late 1990s, bringing out a privately financed EP, Safety, in 1999. Their second single, Yellow, took off, becoming the biggest summer hit of 2000, followed by their chart-topping first album, Parachutes.

The descent into cosmic gloom is all Martin's idea. And if you wonder what he has to be so miserable about, you will not be alone. For here, perhaps, lies the core weakness of the whole Coldplay package. When Morrissey sang about suicide you felt he might actually go through with it. With Coldplay, you think, at best, "nice lyric". It isn't surprising that they have enemies. Inside and outside the business.

Liam Gallagher dismisses them as "a bunch of knobhead students", likening Martin to "a geography teacher", and ridiculing Gwyneth as "that gawky bird". A considerable slice of the mainstream rock audience appears to agree. Certainly it is hard to recall a major band that so many people so actively dislike.

What can Coldplay do? To cheer up would be to sell out. To belt up would be to lose face. Perhaps they need to go away and consider what rock and roll is really about. "It's not about dressing up in leather," says Martin, "and trashing hotel rooms and snorting coke off the back off a hooker. It's about doing what you want. Independence of mind and spirit." And there you have it. A complete misunderstanding of the business. And the reason X&Y can better be described as X*&!*@Y!!